Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips

When building systems, reduce the amount of intricate typing required by users. Sometimes we forget this and require too much hand jamming.

I ran across the phrase “hand jamming” recently at work. I hadn’t heard that in years. I was happy to hear that some people still knew it and knew what it meant. The phrase is akin to “fat finger.”

Hand jamming means I have to jam data into a computer with my hands.

Fat fingering means my fingers move over to the key adjacent to the one I wish to touch and I press the wrong button.

These silly phrases relate to clerical errors. If users are required to put their hands on the keyboard and type things over and again, well, those fingers hit the wrong keys and those eyeballs don’t see the typographical errors.

Building a system? Do what you can to reduce the amount of “see this here and type it exactly right there.” That hand jamming leads to fat fingering and those errors will catch up with us. Let’s do better.